Greece has had to make sac­ri­fices

Europe

the win­ter months, the coun­try had to com­mit to fur­ther aus­ter­ity mea­sures, in­clud­ing more spend­ing cuts and tax in­creases.

Greece also had to com­plete a bond buy­back pro­gram, which is in­tended to lighten its crush­ing debt load. This week, Greece said it would buy back $41.5 bil­lion of its bonds from pri­vate in­vestors at one-third of their face value.

Greece has been bat­tered by a fi­nan­cial cri­sis since late 2009 that has left it de­pen­dent on funds from in­ter­na­tional res­cue loans for the past two and a half years.

In re­turn for the money, the aus­ter­ity has contributed to a crush­ing re­ces­sion.

Fig­ures ear­lier Thurs­day from the coun­try’s statis­tics of­fice showed un­em­ploy­ment at a record high of 24.8 per­cent in the third quar­ter